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Q&A: Fantasy Baseball Creator Daniel Okrent

He's been the public editor of The New York Times and the managing editor of Life, and one of his books got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. But Daniel Okrent is best known as the inventor of Rotisserie baseball—the forerunner of the fantasy-baseball leagues that consume zillions of American man-hours every year.

Okrent created the game over lunch with a handful of friends at New York City's now defunct La Rotisserie Française restaurant. The first draft of the Rotisserie League occurred the following April at somebody's apartment. Within a year, every press box in the Major Leagues had a running game of its own. The term "fantasy" caught on, and the rest is history.

As Americans sit down to plot out their draft strategies this month, Jonathan Kelly, who played in the same Rotisserie league as Okrent's son as a teenager, discusses our new national pastime with its founding father.

VF Daily: When did you first become interested in baseball?Daniel Okrent: I grew up in Detroit and the Tigers were my team. My father took me to my first game—I remember where I was sitting, and I was a fan from that moment on. I was a crazed baseball card collector as a kid. I played ball after school every day and in the summer. It was a huge part of my life. When I went to college I dropped my interest in baseball entirely. But in 1970 I got seduced back into baseball by [Oakland A's left-handed pitcher] Vida Blue. He was just so damn exciting. From that moment on, I haven't let go of it. The Cubs have been my team for the last 15 years.

When did it occur to you that baseball could be followed and enjoyed through a framework outside of the traditional game?

It came out of a couple of things. I played a lot of baseball board games as a kid. All-Star Baseball, for example, and Stratomatic. What you're doing in these games is being a general manager and assembling a team. Also, while I was an undergraduate, a college professor of mine—whom I used to go to Yankees Stadium with when the Tigers were in town—played a very rudimentary version of what became "Rotisserie" or "fantasy" with a group of junior professors.

How did the game crystallize? When did you begin to share it with friends and colleagues?

I came up with the idea while flying from Hartford to Austin, where I spent about a week a month then at Texas Monthly magazine, and I typed up the rules as soon as I got to my apartment. I had lunch with a few pals the next day, and they weren't interested, so one month later I presented it to friends in New York. There was a group of guys I had lunch with at La Rotisserie Francaise, on 52nd Street, and three of them said they were interested. We talked about a few other people we knew who might also want to be a part of it, and we met for lunch a few months after that, in November or December of 1979. In March of 1980, we all met again at a bar on Third Avenue and decided to go ahead with it. Our first draft took place the next month.

What do you remember from that first draft?

I can't believe it, but I don't remember who I had on that team. What I remember most about that draft was that Mike Schmidt was the first player picked, and he went for $26. [Unlike many leagues today, in which players are picked by a draft system, the early version of Rotisserie baseball relied on an auction.] I also remember that one of our members, Rob Fleder of the Fleder Mice, drafted the $100 outfield, of Bobby Bonds, Ron LeFlore and Dave Kingman—the three of them together cost $100. [Schmidt went on to drive in more runs than the entire $100 outfield that season.]

How soon did you realize you had created a phenomenon?

Pretty quickly. Most of us in the league were in the media, and we got a lot of press coverage that first season. The second season, there were Rotisserie leagues in every Major League press box. In 1981 there was a players' strike, and the writers who were covering baseball had nothing to write about, so they began writing about the teams they had assembled in their own leagues. And that was what popularized it and spread it around very, very widely. We published a book about it in 1984, and it became something of a phenomenon. We tried to protect it. We did protect the trademark "Rotisserie," which is why someone came up with the generic "fantasy." And then when the Internet came around, there was an explosion.

After a few seasons, so many people were playing it and were obsessed with it. People began to know I had this role in it—particularly after I was featured on Ken Burns's baseball documentary—so some people recognized me, and wanted to talk to me about their teams. There is nothing more interesting than your own Rotisserie team, I think, and there is nothing more boring than someone else's. Who gives a shit about whether another person made a good trade or not? I was once followed into a men's room and I actually went to the stall while this guy kept talking to me about whether he should make a trade or not. I suppose I knew then that it had became an obsession.

Do you still play Rotisserie?

I stopped playing in 1995, and then started again in 2001 with some of the original guys. We call it "Rotisserie Lite" or "Slo-Pitch" or "AARP Rotisserie." We will have a draft on April 5th this year, and then we'll have one week of trading and that's it. Then you can just move players up and down from an active roster to a reserve roster and you don't have to talk to anybody else in the league, and you can lead your life like a semi-normal person. It's a senior citizen version of the game.

Who do you expect will be the highest-priced player in your draft?

Ours is National League only. My guess is the highest priced player will be [Cubs outfielder] Alfonso Soriano because of the combination of power and speed. Obviously [Mets' left-handed pitcher Johan] Santana is going to go for a hell of a lot of money too.

Besides following baseball this spring, what else is on your horizon?

I'm writing a history of Prohibition. It's a very rewarding subject, and Ken Burns is doing a documentary on it, which will be wonderful.

Jonathan Kelly is an executive assistant to the editor and a key player on theV.F.* softball team.*